the sacrifice of a goat

The unique italicized headnote for the March 1853 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" bills one episode therein as "Cub, a tragedy in three acts."  Cub is so rhetorically loaded and so stylistically over the top for a hard-bitten Captain of U. S. Dragoons, you have to wonder what all the fuss is about.  As suggested here, the mockudrama of the "imprisoned hero" makes the poor grizzly cub into another (like Bartleby) of Melville's Prisoners, and to one "future reader" (yours truly) reads like Herman Melville's seriocomic reply to criticism of his last novel (Pierre, 1852) in the New York Herald.

Now I notice too, how the Captain knows about the supposed origins of classical tragedy in "the sacrifice of a goat":

In crossing the Platte this morning, the grizzly bear cub came on the scene in his final act.

It will be remembered by the patient and attentive future reader of this dry and methodical narrative, that its first appearance on any stage, was in "high" tragedy—that the first act embraced an unusual amount of sanguinary incident—that an innocent brother, (or sister,) being ruthlessly slain, and the baffled lady-mother left (unceremoniously) full of towering and demonstrative rage,— the imprisoned hero himself sank overwhelmed.—or in a well-acted counterfeit of death, (and was borne off, remember, on a "real" horse.) That in the next act, (and three acts shall do for the tragedy of my bear,—originally they had but one,—but that was at the sacrifice of a goat,) he came to life in a manner that might very well have been criticised as an overdone piece of stage-effect,—but that in fact, the spectators were much moved, and gave full credit to the dangerous passion of his howl....  (March 1853)

 One place you can find the history of Greek tragedy traced to "the sacrifice of a goat" is in John S. Harford's "Essay on the Grecian Drama," reprinted as an introduction to Aeschylus, translated by R. Potter (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1839).  As nicely documented over at Melville's Marginalia Online, on March 19, 1849 Melville bought his own copy of Aeschylus from the Harpers, his publishers.  Very early in the "Essay on Grecian Drama" (the second page in my 1839 edition of Aeschylus), Harford writes:

In all countries where the worship of Bacchus prevailed, it was strongly tinctured by that spirit of licentiousness and sensuality which more or less disgraced the rites of paganism; and in this respect the refined Greeks differed little from neighbouring and less polished nations.
The sacrifice of a goat to Bacchus, which formed a part of the ceremonial, is said to have given birth to the term "tragedy," τραγῳδία, signifying the goat-song. 
--Harford essay in Potter's Aeschylus